Putting in His Two Cents

Crownsville author writes to end hatred

By Ashley Brotherton

Denis Murray wants to put his two cents on the table. After 70 years of reading and thinking and thinking and reading, he believes that death, hate and responsibility are gifts we should appreciate.
“If it weren’t for death,” Murray explains, “we wouldn’t appreciate life. If it weren’t for hate, we would be bystanders in life. With hate comes the choice of hope, a choice that can offer meaning in our lives. And responsibility gives us the need to exert ourselves to sustain life.”
He’s written Pointing At Awe, In Three Tries to conceptualize the human unconscious. You cannot put your unconscious into words, but we all share it, says Murray, who will be signing books at the Annapolis Book Store August 11 at 3pm.
“Unconsciousness is real and we live from it intuitively. It’s how our species has thrived,” he told Bay Weekly. What scares people and leads to conflict, he says, is hearing words that don’t match what we understand.
Fear has interested Murray since childhood, when he saw how evolution scared people.
“Adam and Eve made sense to a lot of people and made people comfortable. Evolution pulled the platform from underneath them,” he says. Murray argues that these theories not only don’t contradict each other but also actually help explain one another.
He puts his two cents on the table, he says, in hopes of saving all of us from going nuclear. By seeing what we have in common, we can tame the hate for the things we fear and don’t understand. Or so he hopes.
That’s awe.